The Andalucian Friend (18 page)

“As far as I know, he’s got three men, so that’s what we’ll have to assume. Two of them are pros: Hector’s bodyguard and the Polack. I don’t know anything about the third one.”

Klaus listened as he ate his steak tartare, chewing quickly. He was holding his knife and fork strangely as he cut the meat.

“He’s got an office here in the city but he doesn’t go there much. The last time I was here watching him he spent a lot of time in that restaurant, so that’s where we’ll strike. We’ve got a contact, he’s going to arrange it.”

“Sounds good to me,” Klaus said without any emotion, then waved to the waiter and pointed at his empty glass.

They left the restaurant and got back in their rental car, then tapped Sandsborgsvägen, Enskede, into the GPS.

“Perform a U-turn now,”
the GPS voice said in German, and Klaus did as it said.

They struggled through the Stockholm traffic, made their way to the tunnel under Södermalm, sticking to the left-hand lane as they crossed the Johanneshov Bridge.

“Like a big golf ball,” Klaus said as they passed the Globe.

They stopped the car outside an unremarkable villa. They rang the doorbell, and it was opened by a balding, middle-aged man with a beer belly, wearing an unfashionable shirt and a tie that was too short. As if he’d just gotten home from work — unfashionable work.

“Wilkommen … meine herren.”

The man laughed at his attempt to speak German.

They followed him down into the basement and the man opened a metal door and indicated for them to go in. Mikhail stepped inside and saw a mass of weapons: revolvers and automatic pistols along one wall, shotguns and high-velocity rifles along the other.

The man smiled excitedly and talked like a presenter on a shopping channel about his darlings —
a gun freak
, Mikhail thought. He interrupted the man’s sales pitch and pointed at the wall.

“Give me a Sig and two telescopic batons.”

The idiot got the gun down and gave Mikhail a small box of ammunition, then started babbling about how the ammunition was Swiss, how much the bullets weighed, what they were particularly good for. He pulled a box from a shelf and took out two batons. Mikhail passed the gun to Klaus and handed the man a bundle of euros.

They left the basement and house without saying good-bye and got back in the car. Klaus checked a piece of paper, then keyed an address into the GPS. Mikhail tapped the number Roland Gentz had given him into his cell and pressed the green button. A man answered at the other end.

“Carlos? I was told to call you, do as you were instructed, we’ll be there in” — Mikhail leaned over and checked the GPS — “in twenty minutes.”

Mikhail ended the call.

“Perform a U-turn now,”
the digital woman said once more.

“Shut up,” Klaus said.

The antiques shops on Roslagsgatan,
the tourist traps in Gamla stan and along Drottninggatan, and all the little shops on Södermalm and Kungsholmen — anything that might be connected to ethnic art, antiques, or just New Age nonsense. Jens had looked everywhere for Thierry. That was pretty much all he had to go on, the guy’s interest in a stone statue from South America … The chances of bumping into Aron or Leszek in the city were fairly slim, but he had been traipsing about for several days now.

Less well-known were the shops in Västmannagatan. Jens had bought a glass globe there a long time ago. The shops lining the street were more focused on curiosities and ’50s design. Jens started from Norra Bantorget and worked his way up toward Odenplan. His tiredness was exacerbated by a serious dose of frustration. However, he had no choice but to continue. In and out of the shops, asking pretty much the same question about whether they dealt in South American cultural artifacts. And whether they knew a man who went by the name of Thierry. The same blank faces each time.

After five blocks he passed the shop where he had bought the globe twenty years before. The shop looked just the same, even if the prices in the window were different. Two doors farther on he came to a little shop that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been looking. The window was small and dark, with just a few select items. Boldly patterned blankets, masks, shields, and spears. He stepped inside. A bell attached to the door rang.

The shop was stuffed to overflowing with old artifacts from every corner of the world, it was like stepping into several different periods from several different places at the same time. Jens found he couldn’t stop looking. There was so much to take in. Old works of art, textiles, furniture, jewelry, statues. It was all beautiful, enticing, and different — imposing, in an inexplicable way. In a glass cabinet in one corner he saw a number of small stone statues, like miniature versions of what he had seen in Thierry’s hand on board the ship.

He heard steps behind him and turned around. The woman who emerged from the curtain to the back room was beautiful. Her hair was big and round, and she was upright without being tall. He guessed she was originally from the West Indies.

“Hello,” he said.

She responded with a smile.

“Thierry … ,” Jens said, as if he had suddenly unconsciously realized that he was in the right place.

She hesitated, then turned and went back behind the curtain again.

Jens could feel his heartbeat quicken. It took a few seconds for the man who emerged to recognize Jens.

“You?”

Thierry had called
Aron and given him a brief explanation of the situation, then passed the receiver to Jens.

Aron had told him to go back out into the street, carry on a bit farther, and go into a restaurant.

Thierry opened the door for him, gesturing along the street.

“That way, he’s waiting for you.”

Jens began walking toward the restaurant. It all felt ridiculous. What were the odds against this? He couldn’t even begin to work it out.

TRASTEN
, it said on a small sign. Jens stepped in and headed toward the bar, counting a dozen or so people at various tables. He asked for a glass of tonic, then looked around the room as he drank.

After a few minutes Aron came out through the swing-doors to the kitchen, saw Jens, and waved him over.

Jens followed Aron through the kitchen, passed through a little corridor, and was shown inside a small office.

The office was very small. A desk with a computer on it, messy, half-full ashtrays, a pile of newspapers, an old stolen road sign leaning against the wall —
NO WAITING
. Dirty coffee cups and a year planner that was several years out of date. A room that was obviously used by more than one person, and most of them probably men. Men who wanted this to be a free zone, a place where no one needed to take any responsibility.

“Sit down, if you can find a chair.”

Jens found one.

“You work here?” he asked as he sat down.

Aron shook his head. “No.”

Aron sat down behind the desk.

“So what’s on your mind?” he asked breezily, smiling at his choice of words.

Jens composed himself quickly.

“After we separated I drove up through Jutland and stopped at my grandmother’s for the night. I woke up with a Glock in my mouth and the big Russian sitting on the edge of the bed.”

Aron raised one eyebrow.

“He knocked me unconscious and took my boxes.”

“The boxes containing your weapons?”

Jens nodded.

“Who were they supposed to be going to?”

“A customer.”

“But not here in Sweden?”

Jens shook his head. Aron thought for a moment.

“Did he know there were weapons in the boxes?”

“No, I don’t think so. He must have attached a transmitter to one of the boxes while they were on the ship. It just happened to be one of mine, not yours.”

Aron pondered for a moment, then looked up.

“So what can I do to help you?”

“I have to get my goods back, I need to know what you know about him … Where he is, how I can get hold of him.”

The inn wasn’t an inn. It was a pizzeria
with the sign
BEER AND WINE
in the window. Dark wood furniture and the cheapest possible paper napkins, coarse and thin.

He ate half a pizza, drank four beers and six shots of something stronger. He had felt the need to get drunk. Lars let his thoughts wander, something he’d recently started to enjoy. Previously he had felt guilty if he didn’t use his thoughts for something profitable, something useful. Now he allowed himself just to let them go without giving them any particular direction, and simply followed them wherever they went. It was wonderful. New feelings rose up and disappeared. He kept himself topped up on pills and felt as relaxed as a sleeping baby. Maybe this was how everyone wanted to feel, maybe this was the state that everyone was looking for once they’d spent a few years in the grown-up world? He smiled to himself, catching the cook’s eye behind the counter. The man seemed worried, and looked away. Lars guessed that he could see his own nirvana-like calm and was upset because he himself wasn’t sharing it. Everyone was jealous of him, that had always been the case.

Lars scratched his cheek hard, he had a small pimple that didn’t seem to want to go.

His face was hot and he had narrow tunnel-vision when he headed up toward Sophie’s house just after nine o’clock. He had eight different places where he could sit and listen to what was going on inside the house, and he alternated between them to avoid attracting too much attention, all of them within a short distance of the house. He parked at number four, unless it was number three? He switched the engine off, pulled on his headphones, and listened. It was silent inside the house. He tried to find Sophie in the soundscape — was she just sitting there? He popped a couple more pills, and the world became more porridgey.

After a while he heard steps in the kitchen heading toward the hall, then the front door opened and closed. He switched to the kitchen microphone, listening to hear if she had gone to open the door for someone or had gone out herself. No sounds in the kitchen, silence in the hall. He waited. She had left the house.

Lars started the car and drove up toward the villa and met her Land Cruiser coming down the hill toward him. He turned the Volvo around at the top.

Being drunk made it harder to follow her, not too close, but not so far back that he lost her. At least the evening traffic was helpful, there weren’t many cars heading into the city along Roslagsvägen. He kept to the middle lane, squinting and using the lines on the road to steer by.

He followed her in to Vasastan, where she stopped outside the Trasten restaurant. Lars found a parking spot farther down and watched in his rearview mirror as Hector walked up to meet her on the sidewalk, then he and Sophie kissed each other on the cheek before going inside the restaurant.